The following discussion of the background art is intended to facilitate an understanding of the present invention only. It should be appreciated that the discussion is not an acknowledgement or admission that any of the material referred to was part of the common general knowledge as at the priority date of the application.
In the healthcare industry, there are about 3 million surgeries performed in Australia each year.
Information relating to hospital operation, medical records and surgery performance is generally recorded manually in folders and paper documents for the purposes of record keeping, clinician co-ordination and procedure set-up and real time operation.
Surgeon's preference cards in the theatre are typically poorly maintained and not updated in a regular or consistent manner, due to lack of transparency and accessibility to relevant information.
Traditional surgical theatres generate considerable waste during theatre set up, and also as a consequence of performing actual surgery. A lack of practical inventory tools often results and so as a safeguard measure, a higher inventory holding rate is maintained than is actually needed. However, maintaining manual stock takes a considerable amount of theatre staff hours to support.
Hospital rebated items also tend to be forgotten and are often not added in to patient's records during surgery, resulting in financial losses for hospitals that can be avoided, but are justified out of the concern for patient safety.
With the increasing digitalisation of hospital processes, hospitals are sitting on extremely large amounts of data such as: financial, administrative, supply chain, patient and laboratory data, medical records, prescription, etc. The problem with this data is that it very often sits with different groups and departments within the organisation in isolation from each other. Consequently, this data is not being shared and is not being used effectively.
Furthermore, at present in Australia, there does not appear to be any system or method that is working efficiently in operating theatres that supplies stock information about objects in stored in the theatre storeroom to managers or administrators that allows for accurate purchasing decisions to be made.
Pre-operation safety checklists are also not being managed properly and clinicians tend to not be well informed prior to surgery. This is a big cause for concern with respect to patient safety and wastes a lot of staff hours to chase up all of the information when required, creating a lot of chaos in operating theatres.
Surgery bookings tend to be done between surgeon's rooms and hospitals via email or fax. Multiple data entries take a lot of time and there is gross dissatisfaction amongst clinicians and patients commencing from patient check-in.
Patient recovery time is generally never measured as a function of surgery performance and thus the “cost per surgery” is not being measured on a case-by-case basis.
Clinicians have been trained to focus on patient care, and are not specialised in object supply, paper based documents and the manual filling-in of information. Consequently, this wastes a lot of nurse hours and records are generally not retrievable unless a major accident happens.
Hospitals work on better disciplines with the training of nursing staff to type all cards in print format, color coding them for different specialties and tracking expensive items such as RFID scanner use, which is a rebatable item. Despite this, problems still remain due to:                Most if not all surgery records Australia wide still being paper-based, requiring manual data entry for any surgery records—inefficient paper systems cause a lot of stress for clinicians and wear out staff making for low job satisfaction. Surgeons' preference cards tend to never be updated on a regular basis, resulting in the loss of tracking information on the latest updated cards.        No real time data collection of usage information.        Experience and memory being used to base recordings of object usage data in the theatre for patients, resulting in human error which cannot be avoided and mistakes that are not easily traceable if minimal time is required.        No simple platform for capturing data in respect of usage information of objects and rebatable items.        Existing systems are complicated and only apply to warehousing, office administration and accounting—there is not any system or method that can be used for operating theatres, and supplying stock information in respect of the theatre storeroom.        Loose tracking of consignment stocks and loan kits. For example, an estimated AUD 1.26 million was consumed for clarifying prostheses rebated codes last year, and an estimated AUD 8.75 million was lost in revenue from unclaimed joint replacement prostheses. Loose tracking of critical medical devices causes high risks for patient safety and results in significant revenue loss for hospitals.        
Whilst the aforementioned description has focused on the healthcare industry, many analogous problems are associated with the hospitality industry and the operation of a large hotel having several kitchens.
Even though the provision of a particular meal may not be essential to the point of being life threatening, nonetheless in terms of efficiency and variety in quality meal preparation and service delivery to the customer logistical management, support and supply issues and problems predominate. These similarly involve communication and ingredient supply problems, which if managed better can result in better efficiencies, customer satisfaction and staff tenure.